Skip to main content
Sauce

Caper Sauce

A sauce made with capers, parsley, grated bread, salt, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Caper Sauce

Why it works: Capers and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Caper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop half of the capers very fine and leave the rest whole.

  2. Chop the parsley and mix it with the grated bread and salt.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the chopped capers, parsley mixture, and whole capers to the melted butter.

  3. Let the mixture boil briefly before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Parsley + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Capers + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Capers
Provide the sharp, briny flavour that defines the sauce.
Butter
Forms the fatty base of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
Grated bread
Adds body and slightly thickens the sauce.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma and a light herbal note.

The step that matters

Let the mixture boil briefly before serving. Boiling briefly cooks the raw bread and herbs and blends the butter with the other ingredients. Boiling too long can make the butter separate or the sauce turn oily, so watch it closely.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, bread, butter):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Capersthe original
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Sagefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More caper sauce recipes

Brown 12Substitute 10Mock 6Anchovy 3for Boiled Mutton 3Egg 3 See all 218 →

You might also like

Bread SauceBread Sauce7 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes